The manifesto of our vision and of the fundamental engineering concepts supporting our products, and the live expression of the architectural and technological ideas behind our systems, is supposed to be Asta Objects. That is a generic information management system that allows for object-oriented modelling of arbitrary textual, multimedia and geograpic information, and storing the meta-data describing the information model together with regular data in the same form and in the same repository. Deployed as a highly scalable cloud computing solution both in the SaaS and the PaaS model, Asta Objects enables web service and mobile application access to both data and meta-data, allowing for managing data and meta-data using the same technical means. Asta Objects constitutes an important element of our product development platform, playing the role of the root from which all other systems are derived.